Counting Airplanes
by SaintAugustana
Summary: Joey visits the gravesite of her dead parents and reflects. No warnings.


**Counting Airplanes 12.17.07 **

Joey knelt in front of her parents' gravestone. One hand was clenched around her father's old marine-issue tags hanging by a long chain around her neck, and the other absentmindedly ran over the grass to her side. She gripped a handful, but didn't pull it up.

Airplanes flew overhead. Joey shifted a little in the cold wind and shuffled forward a little to rest, back against the smooth, icy stone. The shadow it cast enveloped her – it was like a void there on the ground before her. Both her parents were less than 6 feet away, and yet, this fact seemed only to pull her farther away from them.

Another airplane. It was going east, perhaps to Russia or Pakistan, to see the people with dark skin and darker weapons. Joey had a fetish for weapons. Always had, always would have.

There came a faint barking echo, most likely emitted from a stray dog, then a low whine. A car skidded on the pavement a few blocks off. Joey almost heard the blood spatter against the concrete.

Numbers whizzed through her head – she counted gravestones, the black birds in the trees, telephone wires strung above the cemetery. She counted the canine casualty of the street a few blocks off. Maybe he'd been happy as hell before being crushed under two tons of man-made machine.

Another dog barked. Time shifted to the left for a second – moved backward on the line. Joey listened for the spatter. There was no such sound, and for a few fleeting seconds this became a pseudo-requiem for the departed stray. The amnesty that comes after death – when those without faith are liberated to freedom and those with faith go forth to suffer in another world.

There was no such amnesty for the living. So, just in case God decided not to show, Joey was ready to face the immediate death – here in the cemetery was as close as she could possibly get.

She wrung her hands in her lap and pulled absentmindedly on the yellow sleeve of her hoodie. Of course it depressed her – being an orphan – maybe not so much as it used to, but enough to humble her usually spontaneous, happy-go-lucky spirit and leave her sitting alone in the cold on a hill in the middle of a Washington, D.C. cemetery. It wasn't often she opted to visit the gravesite of her parents, but she had always gone alone. Once she spent the night huddled next to the gravestone, sleeping as peacefully as a cat under the summer sun. She talked to them, sometimes, as well. But a one-way conversation could only deal out so much relief before becoming a kind of torture.

Always Gibbs found her there. It was his intuition, somehow, to know where she was at all times. He was the one her parents trusted to take care of her should anything happen to them. Gibbs memorized Joey's pattern of behavior, knew her friends and where she liked to go. He was protective, almost to a fault. Sometimes, Joey felt like an animal trapped in human skin.

The cemetery was reminiscent of an armistice – an extended metaphor, in itself, to battle and those it plagues. Joey had always believed in Tarrou's philosophy that war was "never over," and yet, she sought ways to escape the hold.

Gibbs was a federal agent. This was his history, a history Joey had been pulled into abruptly, after her parents were killed. The latest case had been difficult, to say the least and put it simply. Long shifts and late nights for the team members, and to top it all off a warehouse bombing, with Joey caught in the middle, literally, trying to diffuse the bomb.

Another hospital visit – and another cast, and more stitches, and one more scar.

Another airplane soared overheard. It was going south. Joey watched it, head tipped upwards, squinting a little, as it passed and dipped behind the tree on the next hill over.

The next hill over wasn't even in the cemetery – it was beyond the iron fence, in the park. There was a dark figure walking across the pathway, heading for the cemetery gates.

Joey slumped down and sighed, a white, frosty steam formed near her mouth and disappeared. She laid down on the ground. At this point, after all the deep thought and mechanized bouts of suffering, one may assume Joey was down for the emotional count and thoroughly sorrowful, but there had been no change in her mindset. Although a mood may change with the environment, there was most certainly no slip into depression.

Seeing Gibbs made her happy – she enjoyed the time spent alone with her parents. Sometimes it was all she needed to wipe her mental chalkboard clean. The chalk powder would scatter, just like the snowy days raining down on the cemetery. Many people had come and gone in her short lifetime – a heavy burden to bear – but there was always near her soul, heart, and mind an eraser or a place to go to establish purity again, as impure as purity may be, is, or will be.   
It didn't matter.

Gibbs approached against the wind, his grey hair ruffling in the wind. His collar was turned up, his trenchcoat came to his knees; Joey had already caught the smell of sawdust and coffee and found herself comforted.

He knelt down beside her and leaned against the gravestone, rubbing her back. She huddled up against him and basked in his body warmth, tagging the minutes as they pushed forward on the scale. Another airplane zoomed by. Joey watched its reflection in the crystal skyscrapers, smooth and distorted, gleaming in some places, dark in others. Gone.

It was going west, perhaps to Australia or Japan. Beyond that the world kept going, on to Russia, maybe Pakistan. Algeria, Brazil. Bermuda, the Caribbean. Washington D.C.

Planes didn't just disappear.

Joey remained objective to the metaphor. All around her the city pulsed and undulated in rhythmic breaths. No sound, save for the rhapsody in her head – voices and places and names. The counting ceased, airplanes approached from every direction. Joey didn't know where they were going to.

She only knew they'd be back.


End file.
